Contact with the criminal legal system has been shown to reduce individuals’ political participation, but its effect on friends and family members is less clear. Do people who see loved ones arrested or incarcerated become mobilized to change the system, or do they withdraw from political life? I address this question using administrative data from one large county, identifying registered voters who live with someone facing misdemeanor charges. Court records and vote histories allow me to accurately measure proximate criminal justice exposure and voting for a broader sample of people than survey data would. Using case timing for arrests shortly before and shortly after the election allows me to avoid bias from omitted variables. I find evidence of a short-term demobilization effect for people who see household members convicted or jailed in the weeks before the election, but no evidence of a lasting turnout effect from these experiences.

Theories of the economic causes of war are at least as old as capitalism, and have in recent years appeared in myriad forms. Around the turn of the last century J. A. Hobson and Lenin developed their famous arguments about the economic driving forces behind imperialist expansion; American opponents of their country's entry into World War I blamed the lobbying of munitions makers; more recently we have had C. Wright Mills and the New Left. The assertions of these theorists are not always susceptible to scientific examination, but to supplement them there have in the past few years been a number of sound and well-documented studies locating in the national economy the groups that benefit most from military expenditures. Such studies show very effectively which industries, and which states, gain disproportionately from defense spending and hence develop some special interest in maintaining or increasing those expenditures. One need not accept Marxist or other extreme positions on the causes of war to find such information relevant to identifying political pressure groups that must be countered or compensated in any effort to reduce the level of military spending.

A question closely related to “Who benefits from defense spending?” is, of course, “Who pays for it?”; but curiously this second problem has received very little attention. Nothing comes free, and defense is no exception. In this paper we shall examine some evidence about what segments of the economy and society sacrifice disproportionately when defense spending rises.

The paper proposes a novel (even if not wholly unprecedented) solution to an old and fundamental problem: What should be the scope of political studies? Arguments have long been directed against the conventional equation of the scope of the field with the study of “state-organizations” and structures that directly impinge upon such organizations. The arguments are convincing. However, the principal proposed alternatives have important flaws of their own. These alternatives are the extension of the scope of the field to phenomena “functionally” similar to state-organizations and the inclusion in polititcal study of all “asymmetrical” social relations—power, influence, or control relations. By means of the classificatory method of “progressive differentiation,” an alternative that seems preferable is worked out: equating political study with the study of authority patterns in any and all social units. That conception of the subject matter of the field, it is argued, avoids all the difficulties raised by other conceptions and affords all of their advantages. Above all, it reconciles subjective interests with scientific (or disciplinary) imperatives and achieves a proper trade-off between the numerousness and homogeneity of phenomena covered by the field—a trade-off critical for the achievement of general, testable, informative empirical theory. A concluding section discusses the place in political study, thus conceived, of the study of international relations and of recent work in “political economy,” which appears to focus on symmetrical, not asymmetrical, interactions.

Senators who seek re-election usually achieve it. Yet it is not clear whether they tend to win mainly because they are incumbents or because their party is strong in their states. Thus, the two principal questions motivating this study are the following: (1) What is the relative importance of party and of incumbency in influencing the outcomes of Senate elections? (2) How has their relative importance changed over the last quarter-century? To answer these questions, a theory is developed accounting for the outcomes of Senate elections in terms of the major potential sources of electoral support given to the candidates, namely, party loyalty, incumbency, “national tides,” and idiosyncratic factors (e.g., issues, personality, local conditions). The theory is then represented in a formal model for which are generated multiple regression estimates of the respective roles of party and incumbency in all postwar Senate contests.

The major finding is that the relative importance of party and incumbency has changed dramatically over the last quarter-century. Party has undergone an overall decline in influence, while incumbency has experienced a roughly proportionate increase. At the same time, the importance of idiosyncratic factors has grown. The implications of these results for broader theories of American politics, including the argument that the United States has been experiencing a “critical realignment,” are noted.

There is a considerable body of work across the social sciences suggesting negativity biases in human attentiveness and decision-making. Recent research suggests that individual variation in negativity biases is correlated with political ideology: persons who have stronger physiological reactions to negative stimuli, this work argues, hold more conservative attitudes. However, such results have mostly been encountered in the United States. Does the link between psychophysiological negativity biases and political ideology apply elsewhere? We answer this question with the most extensive cross-national psychophysiological study to date. Respondents across 17 countries and six continents were exposed to negative and positive televised news reports and static images. Sensors tracked participants’ skin conductance, and a survey captured their left–right political orientation. Analyses performed at three levels of aggregation—respondent-as-a-case, stimuli-as-a-case, and second-by-second time-series—fail to find strong support for the link between negativity biases and political ideology.

A satisfactory model of decision-making in an epistemic democracy must respect democratic values, while advancing citizens’ interests, by taking account of relevant knowledge about the world. Analysis of passages in Aristotle and legislative process in classical Athens points to a “middle way” between independent-guess aggregation and deliberation: an epistemic approach to decision-making that offers a satisfactory model of collective judgment that is both time-sensitive and capable of setting agendas endogenously. By aggregating expertise across multiple domains, Relevant Expertise Aggregation (REA) enables a body of minimally competent voters to make superior choices among multiple options, on matters of common interest. REA differs from a standard Condorcet jury in combining deliberation with voting based on judgments about the reputations and arguments of domain-experts.

Several years ago James Q. Wilson studied the members of the three amateur Democratic clubs in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. He intended his study, by his own admission, to be interesting rather than theoretical, but we have found its theoretical portions to be intriguing. The amateur politicians studies by Wilson primarily concentrated their energies in local politics, although their ambitions extended far beyond local campaigns and issues. Indeed, they expressed a clear desire to alter fundamentally the character of the American party system and, accordingly, all governing institutions.

Wilson's task of identifying and characterizing the political motives and tactics of amateur Democrats was facilitated by the existence of political clubs. He had only to identify the clubs he wished to study and survey their members. Future researchers were left the responsibility of identifying similar political motives and tactics in less well-defined groups. We attempted to do this for a sample of delegates to the Democratic National Convention in 1968, and, following Wilson's criteria, we were successful in identifying a substantial proportion of amateur Democrats.

The amateur Democrat described by Wilson was not set apart from the more conventional party activitsts by his liberalism, his age, education or class. He was not a dilettante or an inept practitioner of politics, nor did he regard politics as an avocation or hobby. Rather the amateur found politics intrinsically interesting because it expressed a conception of the public interest. The political world was perceived in terms of policies and principles which were consistent with the amateur's theory of deomocracy.

This article reports evidence of misspecification of the measurement model for the index of emancipative values, a value construct used as a key explanatory variable in many important contributions to political science. It shows that the scale on which the index is measured is noninvariant across cultural zones and countries in the World Values Survey. In addition, it demonstrates that the current index composition mixes different value dimensions and their actual associations with various political outcomes, in particular the index of effective democracy. However, an analysis using a novel approximate Bayesian approach shows that at least one specific subdimension of emancipative values, known as pro-choice values, truly exists and may be validly measured and compared cross-nationally. The article also contributes to the recent discussion on whether emancipative values are a reflective or a formative construct by providing thought experiments and empirical evidence supporting the former interpretation.

Is local law enforcement conducted differently based on the party in power? I offer an answer to this question by focusing on a case in which law enforcement is elected and has meaningful independent discretion: sheriff compliance with federal requests to detain unauthorized immigrants. Using a regression discontinuity design in a new dataset of over 3,200 partisan sheriff elections and administrative data on sheriff behavior, I find that Democrats and Republicans comply at nearly the same rate. These results contribute to ongoing research into the role that partisanship plays in local policy making, indicating that law enforcement officers make similar choices across party lines even when they have broad authority. I also present evidence that sheriffs hold more similar immigration enforcement views across party than the general public, highlighting the role of candidate entry and selection in determining the level of partisan polarization.

Unraveling the nexus between agents and structures is fundamental to an understanding of political and social change. The two most prominent methodological approaches to explain revolutionary collective action involve either individual reductionism or structural reductionism. Both approaches result in theoretical inconsistencies and/or explanatory anomalies. An alternative proposed here utilizes the concept of framing developed in behavioral decision theory primarily by Quatrone and Tversky. It directly addresses the agent-structure problem by developing the proposition that individuals evoke alternative decision rules in different structural contexts. The result is greater theoretical coherence and resolution of anomalous cases. Additionally, this model begins to define a new role for ideology in explanations of revolutionary collective action.

We clarify the theoretical foundations of partisan fairness standards for district-based democratic electoral systems, including essential assumptions and definitions not previously recognized, formalized, or in some cases even discussed. We also offer extensive empirical evidence for assumptions with observable implications. We cover partisan symmetry, the most commonly accepted fairness standard, and other perspectives. Throughout, we follow a fundamental principle of statistical inference too often ignored in this literature—defining the quantity of interest separately so its measures can be proven wrong, evaluated, and improved. This enables us to prove which of the many newly proposed fairness measures are statistically appropriate and which are biased, limited, or not measures of the theoretical quantity they seek to estimate at all. Because real-world redistricting and gerrymandering involve complicated politics with numerous participants and conflicting goals, measures biased for partisan fairness sometimes still provide useful descriptions of other aspects of electoral systems.

It is well documented that voter turnout is lower among persons who grow up in families from a low socioeconomic status compared with persons from high-status families. This paper examines whether reforms in education can help reduce this gap. We establish causality by exploiting a pilot scheme preceding a large reform of Swedish upper secondary education in the early 1990s, which gave rise to exogenous variation in educational attainment between individuals living in different municipalities or born in different years. Similar to recent studies employing credible identification strategies, we fail to find a statistically significant average effect of education on political participation. We move past previous studies, however, and show that the reform nevertheless contributed to narrowing the voting gap between individuals of different social backgrounds by raising turnout among those from low socioeconomic status households. The results thus square well with other recent studies arguing that education is particularly important for uplifting politically marginalized groups.

Homeowners and renters have participated in politics at different rates throughout American history, but does becoming a property owner motivate an individual to participate in local politics? I combine deed-level property records in California and Texas with an original dataset on individual comments in local city council meetings to study the role of property ownership in shaping costly forms of political behavior, and I document large inequalities in who participates at city council meetings. I also link property records to individual-level contribution records and administrative voter files and find that becoming a property owner increases an individual’s political activity. Over and above voting in local elections, property ownership motivates individuals to participate in local city council meetings and donate to candidates. These findings illustrate how the experience of homeownership leads property owners to become much more active in local politics.

We propose that the relative influence of clans is an important explanatory factor producing significant variation in state stability and security across societies. We explore the micro-level processes that link clan predominance with dysfunctional syndromes of state behavior. Clans typically privilege agnatic descent from the patriline and are characterized by extreme subordination of women effected through marriage practices. Particular types of marriage practices give rise to particular types of political orders and may be fiercely guarded for just this reason. We construct and validate a Clan Governance Index to investigate which variables related to women's subordination to the patriline in marriage are useful to include in such an index. We then show that clan governance is a useful predictor of indicators of state stability and security, and we probe the value added by its inclusion with other conventional explanatory variables often linked to state stability and security.

“I against my brothers; my brothers and I against my cousins; my cousins, my brothers, and I against the world” (Bedouin saying)

“At the heart of tribes, to varying levels, is a severe patriarchy” (Jacobson 2013, 58).

Many social scientists employed by the government or in the armed services during the war found their research and scientific wisdom not eagerly accepted, wisely interpreted, or sensibly followed by policy-makers. Unlike some of the old-line departments, the war agencies had no established procedure for utilizing social science. Social scientists had a place on the ever-changing organization charts, sometimes merely because it was somewhat vaguely felt that all kinds of brains, even academic, were necessary to win a total war. Often they had to carve out for themselves the specific rôles they wished to play. They functioned, not in accordance with the charts, but within what Mansfield and Marx call informal organizations of their own making.

In many situations, there was a discrepancy between what social scientists thought they could do and what the policy-makers were prepared to let them do. Some sought deliberately to bridge the gap by promoting and marketing their disciplines and themselves. Like their colleagues in the natural sciences, they wished to be consulted when problems involving their own expertness were involved.

The informal techniques that social scientists employed in behalf of social science and themselves are worth recording because certainly similar ones must often be utilized whenever social scientist meets policy-maker. They should be mentioned to any social scientist about to enter government service, so that he can at least be aware of the problem and more easily survive the initial period of disillusionment and misery. They belong, it seems, within the purview of the student of public administration.

“European Integration has slowed down since the mid-50's, and has stopped or reached a plateau since 1957–58.” This is Karl Deutsch's first major conclusion in a recent summary report of findings from a study which he and a number of colleagues have been executing over the past few years. The study appears to be one of the most ambitious and interesting political research projects undertaken in recent years; its findings should be widely useful. In reaching this conclusion, Deutsch's interpretation is not merely that integration has stopped in the relatively narrow realm of formal government decisions; on the contrary, he contends that the process has come to a halt in the “European political environment” as a whole.

Deutsch bases his case on an analysis of trade flows and other transactions, content analysis of the elite press, public opinion surveys and elite interviews. An examination of much the same data, in connection with a study of political socialization in Western Europe, has led me to a radically different conclusion. Far from finding a stagnation of integrative processes since 1958, I would argue that, in some respects, European integration may have moved into full gear only since 1958. In this article I will first present some new evidence concerning attitudes among the younger generation in The Netherlands, France, West Germany and Great Britain; I will then review Deutsch's findings in this context.

Aggregate party identification (macropartisanship) has exhibited substantial movement in the U.S. electorate over the last half century. We contend that a major key to that movement is a rare, massive, and enduring shift of the electoral equilibrium commonly known as a partisan realignment. The research, which is based on time-series data that employ the classic measurement of party identification, shows that the 1980 election triggered a systematic growth of Republican identification that cut deeply into the overwhelming Democratic lead dating back to the New Deal realignment. Although short-term fluctuations in macropartisanship are responsive to the elements of everyday politics, neither presidential approval nor consumer sentiment is found responsible for the 1980 shift.

Voting systems combine balloting methods with decision rules or procedures. Most analyses of approval voting (a balloting method) assume it will be combined with plurality rule but advocates often urge its use with more complex procedures. Because much of the case for approval balloting hinges on its encouragement of sincere voting, we ask whether it retains this advantage when combined with multistage procedures. After distinguishing five forms of sincere and insincere approval voting, we find that certain elements of multistage procedures promote departures from purely sincere strategies, including, in some instances, strictly insincere voting. However, most strategic approval voting involves truncating the approved list, including bullet-voting, which is especially likely under certain threshold rules. Coalitions also increase members' incentive to truncate. We conclude that approval balloting with plurality rule remains preferable to conventional single-vote plurality, but we urge caution and further research regarding combining approval balloting with multistage rules.

Political games and simulations are models or representations of particular political systems and their associated processes. They are techniques for reproducing in a simplified form selected aspects of one system, A, in some independent system, A′. Games and simulations have a dynamic quality produced by the complex interaction of properties in the model. This feature enables them to generate states of the system that differ radically from those present originally. The kinds of transformations that may occur between the initial and final states of a simulation or game are difficult to represent by other means, despite a diversity in modeling procedures ranging from verbal descriptions to differential equations. Because of their apparent applicability to many problems of politics, as well as their novelty, games and simulations have been developed in a variety of areas in political science. They have been used in research, instruction, and policy formation. Although the application of these techniques has been increasing, systematic evaluation of their performance is only now beginning. This essay reports one type of evaluation.

The researchers sought to structure a simulation of international politics so it would reproduce features of the political crisis that preceded the beginning of the First World War. Two separate trials or runs of the simulation were performed as a pilot project. With two runs, the data are sufficient only to illustrate what might be done in an expanded research program.

Weak electoral registration requirements are commonly thought to encourage electoral participation, but may also promote electoral fraud. As one possibility, candidates and their supporters can more easily mobilize voters who do not reside within the district to register there fraudulently and vote for that district's candidates. We statistically detect this classic type of electoral fraud for the first time, by taking advantage of a natural experimental setting in Japanese municipal elections. We argue that whether or not a municipal election was held in April 2003 can be regarded as an “as-if” randomly assigned treatment. A differences-in-differences analysis of municipality–month panel data shows that the increase in the new population just prior to April 2003 is significantly larger in treatment municipalities (with an election) than in control ones (without an election). The estimated effects are decisive enough to change the electoral results when the election is competitive. We argue that our approach—“election timing as treatment”—can be applied to investigate not only this type of electoral fraud but also electoral connections in other countries.